F901Z Spring 2024 Monday Morning Lecture Series

F901Z  Monday Morning Lecture Series
Mondays, 9:40—11:05, Mar. 25—May 13
Seven sessions
Instructors: Anamaria Berea, Jacquelyn Williamson, Daniel Tong, James Maddux, John Barclay Burns, Catherine Maclean, James Kinter, Mary (Missy) Cummings  
Mar. 25: An Exploration of Mars Colonization with Agent-Based Modeling. Establishing a human settlement on Mars is an incredibly complex engineering problem. The inhospitable nature of the Martian environment requires any habitat to be largely self-sustaining. Beyond mining a few basic minerals and water, the colonizers will be dependent on Earth resupply and replenishment of necessities via technological means, i.e., splitting Martian water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. Beyond the technical and engineering challenges, future colonists will also face psychological and human behavior challenges. Anamaria Berea is an associate professor of computational and data sciences in the Computational and Data Sciences department and the director of graduate studies of the Computational Social Sciences program (CSS) in the College of Science at George Mason University. She is also the CSS concentration head for the Master of Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (GMU). She serves as an affiliate faculty and super mentor for Frontier Development Lab (FDL), an affiliate with the SETI Institute and as a research investigator for Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS). She has a PhD in Computational Social Sciences (2012) and a PhD in Economics (2010). Her current research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence and space sciences.
Apr. 1: The Imaginary Cleopatra. This discussion highlights how the Cleopatra in popular culture is a creation of what we would now call "fake news"—i.e. slander—by ancient Rome. The talk will review the historic Cleopatra and how Roman political needs led to her modern phantasm. The speaker, who was interviewed on the recent Netflix documentary about Cleopatra, will also discuss how this new documentary created yet another imaginary Cleopatra. Jacquelyn Williamson is associate professor of Ancient Art and Archaeology at George Mason University. Focusing on gender and religious power, her first book is on her identification of the Sun Temple of Nefertiti, published with Harvard Egyptology Series/Brill. She has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, and U.C. Berkeley and received a Fulbright for her dissertation research.
Apr. 8: Dust Storms. As the Earth warms, extreme weather events such as dust storms and wildfires are rising in North America. Dust storms impose substantial risks to many sectors of American society, including human health, environmental health, transportation safety, and the general economy. Despite the high stakes, risks associated with dust hazards remain largely understudied and knowledge is rather fragmented. Gaps between knowledge and public awareness are costly for our society. This work discusses the linkage between climate change to dust storms and their societal effects in the US. Dust storms cause respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and a unique and mysterious fungal infection called Valley fever (coccidioidomycosis). Cases of Valley fever have increased by 700% from 1998-2021 but the reasons are still unknown. Also unknown is the number of people killed by dust-associated traffic crashes. We developed a new dataset that shows dust storms killed 20-fold more people than previously reported, life losses comparable to those from other weather hazards such as hurricanes, thunderstorms, lightning, and wildfires. Daniel Tong is an associate professor of Aerosols and Atmospheric and the director of the Cooperative Institute of Satellite and Earth System Studies Chemistry at George Mason University. Dr. Tong obtained his B.S in Chemistry and B.A. in Finance from Ocean University of China, his PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from North Carolina State University, and received his postdoctoral training in Environmental Policy at Princeton University. His research focuses on modeling and prediction of natural and anthropogenic emissions, and their effects on air quality, human health, and climate. Dr. Tong is the chair of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) dust research program, and the president-elect of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) GeoHealth Section.
Apr. 22: Beyond Kilts, Tartans and Bagpipes: Scotland, Its Past, Present and Future. This talk will begin with a brief survey of Scottish history and the idea of Scottish identity, both as a people and a nation, finishing with the Unions of the Crowns (1603) and Parliaments (1707). The 18th century saw the two Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 which dealt a severe blow to the culture of the Highlands. Scotland geographically and ethnically has always been divided between Lowlands and Highlands. The collapse of Highland culture, kilts, tartans, bagpipes and the Gaelic language post 1745 was, curiously, only the prelude to its resurgence in the 19th century and beyond. The reasons for this: royal visits, the use of highland clan warriors in the expanding British Empire, romanticism, and tourism will be examined. The opposing attraction of England and Britishness (the Conservative Party in Scotland is called the Unionist Party) and the push back in the rise of Scottish nationalism in the 20th century and the current moves to independence in a post Brexit era will follow. The resurgence of interest in Scottish history and culture during the past century and into the present and its expression in the overwhelming return of kilts, tartans, and bagpipes as symbols of the entire nation and the future, or not, of full Scottish independence will conclude the talk. John Barclay Burns was born and raised in Scotland and educated at the Universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow. He pastored Presbyterian churches in Scotland, Canada, and Fairfax, Virginia, before joining the Religious Studies faculty at George Mason University in 1986. Emeritus since 2011, he continues to teach in the department. A keen actor, he is a member of several community theatre groups in the area. He has given lecture series at Encore Learning and at the Smithsonian.
Apr. 29: Into the Weeds: Marijuana Regulation and Analysis. How best to regulate marijuana is arguably one of the highest-priority drug policy questions in the U.S. While marijuana possession has been prohibited federally since the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, recent decades have seen substantial legislation on the part of states—legalizing first marijuana for medical purposes and later legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes—that has opened marijuana markets to a greater degree than at any point in nearly a century. These state-level actions create tension between state and federal laws around marijuana. Given that marijuana is the most commonly used drug in the U.S., and poses both potential for health benefits and health harms, optimal regulation is crucial, yet complicated. This lecture provides an overview of issues related to regulation of marijuana in the U.S. and considers methods that can be used to evaluate local, state, and federal marijuana policies. Topics include (but are not limited to) the history of marijuana and its regulation; trends in marijuana use and perception; health, fiscal, and social implications of marijuana use; market structure; relationships between marijuana and other substances; and a discussion of recent studies that explore the impacts of marijuana regulation on health and labor supply outcomes. Catherine Maclean is a health and labor economist working mainly in the areas of substance use, mental health, and public policies. She is a co-editor at the?Journal of Policy Analysis and Management?and an associate editor at the?Journal of Health Economics. To date, Professor Maclean has published 82 peer-reviewed articles and one book chapter, and her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, American Cancer Society, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Wellbeing Trust, and the American Heart Association.    
May 6: Climate Change. There is an old saying, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Unfortunately, it isn’t true – all of us are inadvertently doing something about the weather: we are changing, and not for the better. The reality of global warming is now undeniable, and the likelihood is high that humans who burn fossil fuels and change the landscape through deforestation have caused the majority of climate changed we have observed in at least the past half-century. The residents and businesses of Virginia are not exempt from the changes Earth is experiencing and is likely to experience over the coming decades: there will be a new normal and it will be far from what we have thought was normal in the past. Knowing where, when, and by how much climate will change in the Commonwealth is critically important to planning and preparing for the impacts that are decades in the making. This lecture will describe what we have learned about the recent climate changes, what we can expect – globally, in the mid-Atlantic, and in Virginia – and what remains to be done to advance our understanding to support action toward a more resilient and responsible Commonwealth. James Kinter is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Sciences of the College of Science, and director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA). His research includes studies of climate variability and predictability, focusing on phenomena such as monsoons and El Niño, and climate dynamics processes including atmosphere-land interaction. He is also director of the Virginia Climate Center, which is dedicated to enhancing the Commonwealth's resilience to the impacts of climate variability and change through direct engagement with local governments and businesses. After earning his doctorate in geophysical fluid dynamics at Princeton University in 1984, Dr. Kinter served as a National Research Council associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and as a faculty member of the University of Maryland prior to helping to create COLA in 1993.  
May 13: The Promises and Perils of AI. While artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been touted as very successful across a number of domains, including transportation, medical applications, and business, the reality that such systems may not actually be as capable as envisioned is slowly creeping into the national consciousness. While AI can show up in many every day applications from shopping to management of home automation, it is the application of AI in safety-critical systems like transportation and medicine that is the most concerning since literally the incorrect use of AI can have deadly consequences. Problems with automotive computer vision, for example, have been contributing factors in many fatal Tesla crashes and also have led to public backlash in San Francisco. AI has been heralded as a success in health care settings including drug discovery and radiology. While these successes are important steps towards making AI a useful tool in aiding diagnostic applications, there have also been many spectacular failures. IBM’s Watson, the decision-making engine behind the Jeopardy AI success, has been deemed a costly and potentially deadly failure when extended to medical applications like cancer diagnosis. Alphabet’s DeepMind medical AI applications are facing similar questions, and the arrival of error-prone large language models has only further complicated the AI debate. Given these issues, it is important to step back and analyze just why AI is struggling to gain traction in safety-critical systems and how the roadmap to success would need to change to achieve positive outcomes. To this end, this talk will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of AI and make recommendations for human-AI collaborative systems as well as paths forward to mitigate the impact of AI misapplications and better inform future uses. Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is a professor in the George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing and is the director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC). She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) fellow, and recently served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Her research interests include the application of artificial intelligence in safety-critical systems, assured autonomy, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.